An Interview with Mike Soucie

Interviewed By: Geetesh Bajaj

Date Created: February 15th 2007Last Updated: March 4th 2009

Mike Soucie is the president and CEO of Electric
Rain, as well as co-founder. In this role, Mike is responsible
for the company’s strategic oversight, planning and implementation.
He has successfully negotiated major partnerships with big software
players such as Microsoft, Macromedia, Adobe and Autodesk. Previously,
Mike was the senior marketing director for the Oasis Marketing Group
where he garnered significant experience in business and marketing
by developing, negotiating and managing million dollar grassroots
marketing campaigns for Coca-Cola. Mike holds a Bachelor’s
of Science degree in Marketing from the University of Colorado.

Geetesh: Tell us more about yourself
and Electric Rain.

Mike: My name is Mike Soucie, and I’m President and CEO
of Electric Rain, a 3D and multimedia software company based out of Boulder,
CO.

My brother John and I were inspired growing up watching movies like Star Wars
- Phantom Menace and other cool movies that featured awesome Hollywood special
effects and wondering how the heck they were made. As we grew up, John had a
career as a computer programmer and I pursed a successful career in marketing,
but we still talked about how cool it would be to start a business making special
effects software for the masses. So we got together and started Electric Rain
in John’s basement in 1995, with a vision of bringing easy-to-use multimedia
creation and editing tools to business and design professionals.

In 1997 we released a 3D program called Font FX. Then in 1998 we came across
Macromedia Flash and built a 3D Flash-based product called Swift 3D. Today we
have sold more than 70,000 units, and have grown the company to 15 people. Swift
3D enables Flash designers to quickly and easily create 3D vector artwork for
their Flash projects. A few years ago, through personal experiences giving business
presentations and being surrounded by creative Flash designers, we realized how
rich motion-graphic presentations with great design could really draw-in an audience
and keep them excited and engaged. It was this personal experience that seeded
the idea for a better way of creating and delivering presentations.

So the idea for StandOut was actually conceived in 2002, but it wasn’t
until the technology within Windows Vista came along that could deliver on our
ideas and dreams for the product. This underlying power in Vista is enabling
Electric Rain to truly innovate. We no longer have to compromise our designer's
GUI vision; we can create innovative features like Flypaper, and now deliver
unparalleled, next-generation user experiences that truly drive customer value.

Geetesh: Tell us more about
your upcoming product - StandOut.

Mike: StandOut is a presentation solution that solves a long-standing
problem of making custom, high-end presentations more accessible and usable
for all presenters. In the past, presenters have been forced to either create
their own presentations using traditional slideshow software, or engage with
a design firm to build a custom presentation using multimedia software such
as Flash. The problem with using slideshow software is that most presenters
are not trained as graphic designers or animators so the resulting visuals
are often shabby and sometimes even distracting for an audience. Meanwhile,
the problem with the custom presentation option is that although the results
look terrific, those presentations can only be edited by the professional
designers who created them, so they are not very practical as a long-term
solution.

What StandOut does is allows professional designers to continue building these
high quality custom presentations, but when they deliver those presentations
to their clients they also supply them with a tool that enables the presenter
to easily edit those presentations. Furthermore, the StandOut solution allows
the designer to build extensive flexibility into those custom presentations so
presenters can update their content, reconfigure the flow of their presentation,
or even rebuild their presentation from scratch using all new material, all without
affecting the design built into the original presentation.

Of course, in the end StandOut is really a solution for the audience because
they’re the most important component in all presentation scenarios. By
using StandOut, presenters will finally be able to offer a visual experience
to their audience that matches the quality of their own personal delivery. And
when audiences like what they hear and see, they become even more engaged with
what the presenter has to offer. Simply put, StandOut allows you to deliver remarkable
presentations that get better results.

Geetesh: StandOut is a very
different product from the others that you create - what motivated you
to get into the presentation design and delivery sphere.

Mike: It was really through a personal pain we experienced
early on in the history of Electric Rain. As we began promoting our Swift
3D product line we found ourselves giving presentations and demos to large
audiences of designers and were somewhat embarrassed to be using PowerPoint
when the other presenters, all of whom were Flash experts, were showing
really gorgeous, and very cool supporting visuals. This led us to begin
having each and every presentation we gave be built by our in-house designer
using Flash, but it was so cumbersome to have him make every last update
to those presentations for each new event we attended, especially when
it was just changing a few words here and there. We figured that if Electric
Rain had this problem then there must be others out there with the same
pain, so we began building StandOut.

Interestingly, although we started out trying to enable the delivery of better
looking presentations, our research pointed out many areas where slideshow software
was really failing presenters and their desire to create effective visual communication
experiences. As the product concept evolved we found ourselves developing tools,
systems and a user workflow that better supported the presenter at every step
of the presentation creation and delivery process. So now StandOut helps presenters
deliver better looking presentations that accomplish much more than just turning
heads. Standout helps presenters get their point across more effectively, which
benefits everyone in the end.

Geetesh: What will Standout
offer to PowerPoint users - will there be a move-up path for them to
migrate their content in both directions?

Mike: We’re well aware of the fact that most presentation
content is currently contained within the hundreds of millions of PowerPoint
files that exist out there, so we’ve built a PowerPoint converter to
ease our users, and their content, into this new world of presentations we’re
offering with StandOut. As far as making a round trip with that presentation
content back into the original application that it came from, it’s not
quite as simple. Some of the features we’ve built into our system that
enable more effective presentation visuals make for a difficult “re-entry” into
a slideshow application. For example, we have abandoned the outdated slide
paradigm from StandOut to adopt a more natural flow for presentation visuals
and their delivery. Although this new model allows for a smoother and more
understandable progression through a presentation, it makes it a bit tough
to re-divide that content back into slide-sized chunks needed to fit into slideshow
software. So for now we are hoping the demand for round-tripping will not be
a show stopper, and once we get Version 1.0 out the door we can explore solutions
for a more seamless workflow between StandOut and PowerPoint in both directions.
But hey, at least we make it easy to get people to migrate in the right direction!

Geetesh: Tell us something about your
favorite Standout feature.

Mike: That’s an easy one. Flypaper. When we looked at what
we could do to provide a more effective process for presenters developing their
presentation content, the concept of “C.O.R.E. Workflow” evolved,
which stands for Collect, Organize, Refine and Express. These are the key steps
that the top presentation consultants recommend that everyone go through as
they develop their presentation content, and our Flypaper interface was built
to specifically support each of these critical steps.

Flypaper is essentially a gigantic digital bulletin board that can accept many
types of content that a user may have related to their presentation. As the name
implies, resources such as images, video, notes, documents, URLs, text snippets,
PowerPoints, etc. can be ‘stuck’ to flypaper. Once attached to the
surface of Flypaper, these resources can be easily moved around, grouped together
into logical chunks, refined according to their relative importance within the
presentation, and finally moved into the StandOut outline to be expressed visually.
Not only is Flypaper a more effective way to create a presentation, but as you
gather more resources it becomes fun to navigate through your material by using
panning and zooming controls, much like you would explore a complex landscape
with high-powered camera. Aside from the actual presentations StandOut produces,
Flypaper is the one feature that everyone sees and says “Now that’s
cool!”

Geetesh: When do you plan to release
StandOut?

Mike: We are hoping to release version one of StandOut in the second
quarter of 2007.

Geetesh: Can you share some trivia
with Indezine readers - or just share a tip, an unconventional use of your
product, or anything else that you would like to say?

Mike: Although your readers may see StandOut as solution for presenters,
it happens to be a great solution for designers as well. The initial success
of StandOut is somewhat reliant upon designers selling their clients on the
need to improve their presentations, so we’re actively involving them
in the business model as much as possible. With StandOut, design firms and
ad agencies can begin selling the more premium service of a rich media presentation
instead of a PowerPoint background. But they can also make additional income
from selling our software directly to their clients because anyone who needs
to edit those presentations will have to have a copy of StandOut. We are also
going to be developing a designer network where these custom presentations
can be sold to the general public along with StandOut. This offers design firms
the ability to establish a recurring source of revenue and exposing their design
work to the entire presentation space. For us, that’s an exciting prospect
because we love to see designers using our software to create things that most
business presenters have never even imagined.